17 March 2006CIVIL WARNB: In my estimation, this is not the one of the better things I've written. But I had to write something. Writing's a way to keep Work from defining me. And frankly Work is one of the things contributing to the distance, disaffection, and incapacity I feel almost daily, despite my conscious efforts at optimism and, in many respects, never having been better off materially than I am now.I'm an archaeologist. In a world in where truth is appearance, a constant now, saying this is like saying that I'm a caretaker for ghosts. In a world that denies death, saying this is like saying that I dig graves for people who never existed. It may sound ridiculous. The public image of an archaeologist is glamorous. Archaeologists are thought to fill galleries and museums with glittering goods. One might think they are ghost destroyers: they recoup the past and cause it to vanish in the glory of the present. Not so. Perhaps nine tenths of archaeology takes place in the netherworld of everyday taken-for-granteds, just as undertaking and typography do. The other tenth or so exists mainly in dark academic corridors. Less visible than even they, though, are the ghosts the care for, the people whose history is written in dust and broken tools. --- Northeast of Gettysburg, wedged between two shopping centers, a McDonald's, and an abandoned farm lot, are what remains of a trailer park that a vast desert of asphalt truncated ten years ago. The landlord is capitalist lowlife who owns several such low-rent suburbs of small towns in south central Pennsylvania. Of course, in his own mind, he leads the high life elsewhere, among the good and the beautiful. While some of the people in the enclave own their trailers, none of them owns the lots they sit on, and it was only after persuasion bordering on threat that the landlord agreed to give the tenants advance notice that my archaeological team would be digging test pits in their yards. The day before we were to start, I had to mark the locations of our excavations on the lots. I decided to go door to door, which anyway is my habit in like situations, to see if the landowner's agents had informed everybody properly. Besides, I wanted to let the tenants know who I (a stranger) was, why I was spray-painting spots in their yards and sticking little orange flags in them, and what exactly I planned to do with the territory I was staking out. The landlord had kept his word, remarkably, but not everyone had had a chance to read his notice. Many of the inhabitants of the so called "Mews" have put a lot of work into their tentative surroundings. As in any neighborhood of persons thrown together, there were a few seedy dwellings: one trailer with months-old trash piled on the porch, including a big cardboard box of jars of molding Doritos brand salsa; another painted black, with heavy drapes over all the windows and a sign in front warning trespassers about the Rottweiler; and still another, whose windows were entirely covered in Styrofoam insulation, and which apparently teenagers with 1000-yard stares inhabited. A shit-mouthed mother and her shrill children, who though they lived in one corner of the parcel, were nevertheless everywhere present at any time of the day. However, in most cases, those who lived there had tried to make homes of their often make-shift premises, as people throughout the world do. To the owner, on the contrary, this land isn't home; it's just an instrument for making profit. Like landlords across the region, he is selling this old, already amputated trailer park, because a big box mart on the land will fetch a better price. One of the first persons I met while making my rounds was a white guy named Darrell. Darrell had been carefully carving Styrofoam into ashlar and rusticated blocks, so as to create a sort of Georgian façade, including a peaked pediment, for the shed behind his home. When I came along, he cheerfully offered to move a stack of PVC pipe out of my way. I thanked him, but told him that he didn't need to move it, and that we would work around it. Then he asked me what we were doing. The official line, for fear of looters, was that we were "testing the subsoil." This was not only a white lie but also an absurd explanation. I repeated it nonetheless. Some people there knew that the archaeological site we sought was in the vicinity. Its location wasn't first among Darrell's concerns. Some archaeologists would have thought less of him for his disregard. After a lull in the conversation, he -- a middle-aged man with hard hands and a world-weary face -- looked at me with an expression like that of a child who has understood death for the first time. He asked, anticipating the answer, "We're not going to be here for long, are we?" I replied, "No, probably not." A little later, on a lane in a different part of the neighborhood a young black man pulled alongside me in a battered old car and remarked - his anger toward the land owner barely concealed in his shaking voice, "It's a crying shame. There are children and old people here...." He told me to take my time doing what I was under contract to do. I wished that I could. I came to the home of a young Latina mother, and I explained to her in second-rate Spanish what I was doing. She understood the implications. She let her son outside to play with the toys in the yard. An old lady living by herself up the same road had obviously spent years, even decades, improving her patch of ground with rock and water features, gravel paths, and tiny picket fences. When I told her that our "subsoil testing" was in advance of eventual conversion of the property to commercial use, she began to weep and said hopelessly, "I don't want to lose my home." At first, I wanted to cry with her; then I got angry. It isn't just that the owner of the trailer park couldn't be bothered to tell those most likely to be detrimentally affected about their designs, but he also thinks the people who live there are too stupid to figure them out. Why should I have been the bearer of their bad news? An indignant desire to discover the archaeological site filled me; I wanted to stop the landowner in his four-wheeled tracks with the discovery. But it is unlikely that I will find anything important; sewer lines and electrical cables, buried since that trailer park was opened in the 1960s (before relevant cultural resource management laws existed), have thoroughly disturbed the ground on which the park sits. The disdain for people who live on strips between malls isn't limited to trailer "slumlords." Their type has always tended to think that their power results from virtue. In general, people's capacity to find someone to piss on is remarkable. Tim is the landlord's handyman. He has swastikas tattooed between the index finger and thumb of both of his hands. They are badly rendered and faded, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and think that they are relics of a misspent youth or a brotherhood he found in prison. He is always pleasant to me -- even eager to please -- but then I am, if nothing else admirable to his eyes, a white man. Last December, when I started the job in Gettysburg, snow covered the ground and the temperature was near zero degrees Fahrenheit. Tim was helping me monitor the operation of heavy machinery. He was trying to entertain me with stories of the "lowlife" that he had had to evict from the trailers, and of the foul and gruesome waste and artifacts he'd had to clean out of these abodes and destroy. He clearly saw himself much superior to "trailer trash." However, when he needed a blowtorch to thaw the treads on a front-end loader, he meekly asked me for $20 to pay for it. By way of an embarrassed excuse, he told me, with an increasingly bitter tone, that just last year he had been doing well for himself, making over $100,000 a year in a business enterprise with his eldest son. He could not see how close his situation was to that of many, if not most, of the people living in the "Mews." Yet if Iraqis count among the pissed-on people of the world right now, Tim had perhaps begun to think about his part in contributing to their misery. Now that his eldest son was no longer in business with him, the son had decided to join the army and so would have to go to Iraq. Tim was worried for his son. But he also wondered aloud, "What are we doing over there anyway?" --- I was relating this story to a friend at a bar back home in Baltimore, when the bartender, ever eavesdropping, overheard me. The barman is good-looking, rarely misses a beat, and has practiced all the witty comebacks. Of course, it's his job to be this way, and he does it well most of the time. However, his behavior and grooming are a mask that he also wears outside of work. He is a dyed-in-the-wool racist, misogynist, and homophobe; but he doesn't wear these attitudes as lightly as some, who like himself, who were brought up not to believe otherwise. He is not above hypocrisy in every one of these respects, and at the same time his growing hatred of different people shows itself as sudden venomous outbursts. While I was speaking the bartender leaned over the bar and said, faking a "Gittisburg" accent (mild mockery for him), "The view sure is nice from this here trailer." I wasn't in a mood to indulge him. "It's easy to make fun," I answered, "Actually, it's very sad." He immediately began to back-pedal, not so much, I suspect, because his conscience seized him (since he shows no interest in changing his ways), but rather because he can't let himself be seen to be disliked. He is an example of the all too common type whose attitude is strutting, seemingly impenetrable, and never-do-wrong. This veneer is diminishing thin and is applied like so much make-up. It draws constantly on the favorable opinion of others, and it is controlled forcefully, with a tendency to paranoia. Beneath it is the dark, self-loathing nucleus of narcissism. It is more disheartening to hear fellow archaeologists ask me such questions as whether the trash I've found on the site is white. These people may claim a certain "scientific" superiority to the developers they work for, but it is vain pretense -- elitism on the cheap while they play to the capitalists' fiddle. I wonder what it is that they are looking in the earth, when the world is already full of the self-glorifying or unintended monuments of Great Men. Perhaps they're looking for an easy road to importance themselves. This often seems to be the pursuit when they claim that they (invariably white) are preserving the memory of some better world of Prehistory, where everyone was authentic and well adapted. There is something quaint and cute about this claim, but there is also a great deal of adolescent condescension. Most of us archaeologists, I hope, are attending to the small and fading, tentative or mistaken -- like the swastikas drawn on Tim's hands. When flesh decays and bones crumble, still sometimes a child's favorite toy is lost in what was once a lawn, the dark stains of long rotten wooden pickets remain, pieces of stone are scattered by a poorly aimed chisel, and the furnishings of a home lie where they were thrown out the door, along with a family long deceased. Time, no matter how measured and commemorated, cannot erase all the scars of our trials, nor the graves they dig to hide their crimes. Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |